A professor of Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin and Ireland's premier literary historian, Declan Kiberd offers this audacious new take on James Joyce's modernist masterpiece. Ulysses, he argues, is not an esoteric work for the scholarly few but rather one rooted in the lives of ordinary citizens, offering a humane vision of a more tolerant and decent life in the modern world. For Kiberd, the seemingly banal hero of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, embodies an intensely ordinary kind of wisdom and, in this way, offers us a model for living well, in the tradition of Homer, Dante, and the Bible—all of which Joyce drew on in writing his book.

"Kiberd's take on Ulysses should be on every undergraduate syllabus that includes Joyce's epic work, as it is an ideal introduction for the uninitiated—accessible, richly argued, funny and, in a kind of devil's advocacy fashion, begging for rebuttal."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)